Supply chains, worker wages and the price of energy has been blamed for the current bout of high inflation. But central bankers around the world are starting to clue in to something consumers have been aware of for a while — corporations just aren’t afraid to raise their prices anymore.
Ah yes, “we” let them and not regulators failing to regulated them.
(food companies all raise prices.)
“Well I’m not letting them get away with that, I’ll starve to death, that will teach them!”
(Electric companies raise prices)
“Screw you too! I’ll sit in the heat and darkness!”
(Gas companies raise prices)
“Ha! I’m already used to this from the last 2, I’ll just walk 4 hours to work and live with no heat in the northeast us! No prob!”
Yeah… We “let” this happen… Ffs…
To be fair I skimmed the article and I don’t see the: “we let them sentiment in it” … I think that may be a bit of editorial liberty.
The articles does seem to empathize with us:
You realize we used to own most of those, right? And the public voted for politicians who sold them for next to nothing?
Through cheating and lying. Gerrymandering.
And then some smaller company goes, “wait a sec, you’re telling me I can increase my market share a bunch if I don’t raise prices? Cool, let’s do that. I can make a bunch of money on volume.” And then some other company does the same thing, and so on until they all do. UNLESS an input into that industry has gone up in price and they all have to raise just to stay afloat. Then we’re back to talking about inflation, supply chains, and money supply instead of companies just choosing to raise prices due to greed or something.
UNLESS the smaller set of players and lack of enforcement of toothless regulation allows them or even incentivizes them to engage in collusion and price fixing.
This is just the neoliberal way, we’re decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.
At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.
Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with “funding provided as a private/public partnership”, that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.
Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.
In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.
The government won’t act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that’s made a small number of people very rich was wrong.
This video covers the UK, but it’s all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah, like I said, non regulation. Those that have the power to screw us all over, did. But don’t worry, unregulated capitalism has fucked this planet. It’s done.
Don’t fret, we still haven’t gotten the final moneyshot.